My brother John Sawyer, who has died aged 86, was a linguist and Old Testament scholar with an incisive and imaginative mind. He was one of the first to apply what is now referred to as “reception history” to a study of the Bible – looking at how it has been interpreted by different readers over the centuries.
John was born in Inchinnan, Renfrewshire, to Beatrice (nee Fergusson), a writer, and the Rev Alek Sawyer, a Church of Scotland minister. Our family moved to Dunbar in 1938, and then, with our father in the services, spent much of the second world war years with my grandmother in Edinburgh, where John attended George Watson’s boys’ college, and found that languages were his forte. He went to Edinburgh University to study classics, graduating with first-class honours in 1957.
His national service with the Royal Scots saw him working as an interpreter in Cyprus, where he also became fluent in Turkish and started studying Hebrew. He then decided to enter the ministry. John graduated with a BD from Edinburgh in 1962, having been excused the Hebrew class in favour of one in Arabic.
After an 18-month fellowship in Jerusalem, he returned to a lectureship at the University of Glasgow, where he was ordained in 1964 as a chaplain. He moved to the University of Newcastle in 1965, where over the next 29 years, eventually promoted to professor and head of the department of religious studies, he wrote a Hebrew grammar, a two-volume commentary on Isaiah, two editions of Prophecy and the Biblical Prophets (1987), and 50 research papers on language and religion.
A move to Lancaster University in 1994 coincided with the publication of perhaps his best-known book, The Fifth Gospel – Isaiah in the History of Christianity (1996). In 2002 he moved to Perugia University in Italy and became editor in chief of the Blackwell Bible Commentary, also singing in the university choir. His research during these years at Perugia also produced A Concise Dictionary of the Bible and its Reception (2009). He returned to Northumberland in 2012 and wrote The Bible in Music (2015), also taking part in choral singing in Alnwick. His published legacy includes nine books, eight edited books or series and more than 100 papers, reviews and notes.
John’s involvement with inter-faith groups in Glasgow, Perugia and especially in Newcastle led him, uniquely, into honorary membership of the Newcastle Reformed Synagogue.
John married three times: his first two marriages, to Rosemary Larmuth in 1965 and Deborah Lilburn in 1990, ended in divorce. He is survived by his third wife, Jean (nee Aaron-Walker), whom he married in 2012, four children – Alexander, Hannah and Sarah from his first marriage and Joseph from his second – and five grandchildren.
